The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Moreover, the most important cause of the quarrel, the demand of the German Christians to expel racially defined non-Aryans from the Church, drew from some not a principled rejection of antisemitism from the Confessing pastors, but merely a different version of it. They believed that baptized Jews were by definition no longer Jews, and they cared little about the unbaptized. Niemöller himself declared publicly in 1935 that the Jews had been eternally cursed because they had caused Christ’s crucifixion. Yet he went on to use this argument to urge a stop to their persecution in the Third Reich: if God had judged them, it was not for humans to intervene with their own hatred, and in any case, had not Jesus told Christians to love their enemies? In this way, Niemöller sought to turn the Nazis’ arguments against themselves. The Jews, he declared, had been too proud of their racial identity as ‘Abraham’s seed’ to heed the gospel of Jesus; now racial pride was causing the Germans to tread the same road, thus opening up the possibility that they too might be cursed for all eternity. Such arguments may themselves seem antisemitic in retrospect; but in the context of the time they had practical consequences of a very different kind.29 Pastors who baptized Jewish children or preached on the virtues of the Old Testament were defamed by German Christians as ‘Jew-pastors’ and had to bear the brunt of repeated invective and insults from their opponents. The difference between the German Christians and the Confessing Church was real enough in the 1930s.30

  The Evangelical Church, as a state institution, had been obliged to adopt the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ in 1933 and to dismiss the eighteen pastors to whom it applied (eleven others were exempt because they had fought in the First World War). For many decades it had devoted some attention to converting Jews to Christianity, but these efforts now encountered growing disapproval in the Church. The Confessing Church had indeed come into existence partly around a protest against this measure, which aroused strong hostility amongst some local pastors. Many Protestant laymen were also disturbed by the overt racial antisemitism of the German Christians. The novelist, poet and broadcaster Jochen Klepper, whose wife was Jewish, was already complaining about the regime’s antisemitism in March 1933. The ‘national revolution’ was creating nothing less than a ‘pogrom atmosphere’, he noted in his diary. For Klepper, a devout Protestant, antisemitism, far from being a natural accompaniment of Christianity, was a denial of Christianity’s biblical heritage: ‘I’m not an antisemite,’ he wrote, ‘because no Believer can be one. I’m not a philosemite, because no Believer can be one - But I believe in God’s Mystery, that he has manifested through the Jews, and for this reason I can do nothing but suffer because of the fact that the Church tolerates what is going on at present.’31

  Yet political considerations among those who were taking responsibility for resisting the German Christians on an institutional level dictated caution. Even Niemöller urged ‘restraint’ on non-Aryan pastors. 32 Reflecting a common tendency to blame anyone but Hitler, another pastor from the Confessing Church coupled his criticism of the leadership principle in the Church with a reminder that God had given them the Leader; it was not Hitler but the Reich Bishop who was responsible for the troubles.33 Moreover, if some rural congregations went over to the Confessing Church en masse, this was generally because, as a Gestapo report on the Potsdam district noted, ‘farming people seem to want to celebrate their Church festivals in the traditional form; as far as they are concerned, they are a part of rural custom and to do away with them would be unthinkable’. What applied to rural districts could equally well apply to the dwindling congregations in the towns and cities, long since deserted by the working class but still popular in conservative artisan, bourgeois and aristocratic circles. The Gestapo report added that the regime had not done enough to overcome such inbred traditionalism. 34 But it was difficult to see what more it could do in reality. The German Christians’ attempt to create a synthesis between German Protestantism and Nazi racism had effectively collapsed.35

  III

  Meanwhile, leading figures in the Confessing Church, such as Niemöller, were placed under surveillance, and acts of official harassment against Confessing pastors began to multiply, augmented by sometimes violent attempts to wrest back control of particular churches by the German Christians, who continued to hold the allegiance of many Protestants all the way up to 1945.36 The failure of the regime to bring the Church to heel was not to be borne lightly. Hitler reluctantly abandoned his ambition of converting it into the official state Church of the Third Reich. Instead, he ordered the creation of a new Ministry for Church Affairs, established in July 1935 under the 48-year-old Hanns Kerrl, a Party member since 1925 and Prussian Minister of Justice from 1933 until the Ministry’s dissolution the following year. The new Ministry was given wide-ranging powers, which Kerrl did not hesitate to deploy in order to bring refractory pastors to heel.37 Kerrl launched serious repressive measures against the Confessing Church, and in particular its Berlin-Brandenburg section, where the dissenters were strongest. Pastors were banned from preaching, or had their pay stopped. They were forbidden to teach in schools. All theological students were ordered to join Nazi organizations. An important Protestant publishing house was confiscated and a Protestant church in Munich demolished. Niemöller was arrested, and by the end of 1937, over 700 Protestant pastors in the country had been imprisoned. Their offence was to have disobeyed government gagging orders on their sermons, government bans on fund-raising for the Confessing Church, or other official decrees and regulations. One hundred and two pastors were arrested in the Postdam district in 1935 for reading out the declarations of the Confessing Church’s synod, though all of them were subsequently released. In some places they were welcomed home by triumphant demonstrations of members of the Steel Helmets, breaking free momentarily from their incorporation into the brownshirts. ‘All the measures taken so far against the Confessing Church’, the Gestapo was forced to confess, ‘have so far proved to be inadequate, and only made the pastors more insubordinate still.’38

  Niemöller’s trial was a fiasco, and he was acquitted of all serious charges. A series of witnesses appeared to testify to his patriotism, and Niemöller himself said that he was far from being a political opponent of the Nazis. He was immediately released. However, when Niemöller was freed on 2 March 1938, he found the Gestapo waiting for him at the prison gates. Hitler had personally ordered him to be rearrested. Niemöller was placed in solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. On the outbreak of war in September 1939, he offered to join the navy again, but the offer was rejected. His rebellion was, he still insisted, purely religious. Nevertheless, his arrest and incarceration aroused widespread condemnation. He was remembered daily in prayers not just in the Confessing Church but in Protestant congregations in many other countries, where he was regarded as a martyr for Christian principles. His continued imprisonment, after having been acquitted by a court of law, caused international embarrassment for the regime. In order to blunt the edge of this worldwide criticism, Hitler gave him day release to see his dying father. The fact that Niemöller was the Leader’s personal prisoner also gave him a limited number of special privileges on certain occasions to placate world opinion. He was allowed occasional visits from his wife, and when news of his poor health became public after one such meeting, the resulting protests led to an improvement in his rations. Nevertheless, when Niemöller’s wife asked Hitler directly for his release in 1939, the Nazi Leader replied that if he was set free he would only gather round him an oppositional group that would endanger the state.39

  Niemöller was in no way immune from the daily humiliations and brutalities which the SS camp guards visited on the inmates. In view of his patient suffering of such maltreatment, and his constantly reiterated faith in God, he gained a considerable degree of moral authority over the other inmates, all of whom he treated undifferentiatingly as victims of an evil regime. It was at this time, seeing the sufferings of the camp’s Jewish inmates, that he came to repudiate his earlier antisemitic vi
ews. Jews, he told a fellow inmate, should be treated exactly like other Germans: his earlier advocacy of restrictions on their civil rights had been wrong. Although Niemöller was given relatively light work duties such as chopping wood, he was frequently beaten on the slightest pretext. On one occasion in the late 1930s, ordered to give his name, he replied that he was Pastor Niemöller. Viciously beaten by the camp guards, he then had to say, ‘I am the swine Niemöller.’ On numerous occasions, the guards, according to the memoir of a fellow inmate, written shortly after the event, made him hop on one foot between them, sometimes crouch and hop. They beat him at the same time to make him more agile. One day he evidently used the name of God (though I could not catch it), for I heard one of the guards shout, ‘The Schweinhund is calling his Drecksgott (dirty god). I would like to see if He will help him out of here.’ Sometimes the Commandant or other officers would stop to watch the play. Then the guards would outdo themselves as they received approving laughs.40

  In 1941, when it seemed possible for a while that Niemöller would convert to Catholicism, Hitler had him moved with three Catholic priests to Dachau, where he was kept in considerably improved conditions almost to the end of the war. But there was never any prospect that he would set him free, particularly when Niemöller decided that he would not convert to Catholicism after all.41 And in the meantime, in his parish in the plush Berlin suburb of Dahlem, the German Christians had won the upper hand again, as his rival, the senior pastor Eberhard Röhricht, previously eclipsed by Niemöller’s charisma, seized the initiative and drove out the core group of the Confessing Church’s supporters from the parish altogether.42

  Looking back on his arrest and imprisonment later in life, Niemöller came to regret the compromises he had made with the regime, and blamed himself for pursuing narrowly religious interests. In the statement that more than anything else has caused his memory to live on across the world, he said:First they took the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they took the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then it was the trade unionists’ turn, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they took the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came and took me, there was no one left who could have stood up for me.43

  For all its power in projecting Niemöller’s retrospective remorse, this famous statement also illustrated the continuing narrowness of his confessional outlook, and the continuing depth of the confessional divide in Germany; for there was one group about which he said nothing at all: the Catholics.44

  CATHOLICS AND PAGANS

  I

  Hitler both admired and feared the Catholic Church, which at the time of his appointment as Reich Chancellor claimed the allegiance of about 20 million Germans, or one-third of the population, mostly in the South and West. Like Bismarck before him, he considered Catholics less than totally committed to the national cause because their Church owed its institutional allegiance not to the German state but to Rome. Other leading Nazis who had come from a Catholic background, such as Joseph Goebbels, also stood in some awe of the Church’s powerful and elaborate organization and its ability to convince its members of the rightness of its creed. Hitler admired the commitment that celibacy gave its priests, and the closeness of its links with the common people.45 Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, reacted against a strict Catholic upbringing with a hatred of the Church that can only be called fanatical. In 1936, Heydrich classified the Jews and the Catholic Church, acting above all through political institutions such the Centre Party, as the two principal enemies of Nazism. As an international body, he argued, the Catholic Church was necessarily subversive of the racial and spiritual integrity of the German people.46 Moreover, the Catholics, unlike the Protestants, had been largely represented by a single political party, the Centre, whose voters, again unlike those of most other parties, had mostly remained loyal and resisted the appeal of Nazism during the elections of the early 1930s. Much of the blame for this could be laid in the Nazis’ view at the feet of the clergy, who had preached vehemently against the Nazi Party, in many cases ruled that Catholics could not join it, and strongly urged their congregations to continue voting for the Centre or its Bavarian equivalent, the Bavarian People’s Party.47 For many if not most leading Nazis, therefore, it was vitally important to reduce the Catholic Church in Germany as quickly as possible to total subservience to the regime.

  The Catholic community had already agreed in 1933 to abandon the Centre Party, which duly wound itself up along with a few other obviously political organizations such as the Catholic Trade Unions, but it expected the vast majority of other lay organizations within the Catholic confession to be allowed to maintain their independence. This expectation seemed reasonable enough to many Catholics in view of the formal Concordat concluded between the Nazi regime and the Papacy in July 1933, which had promised to protect Catholic lay institutions in return for the Church’s commitment to abstain from any involvement in politics. 48 The Concordat’s provisions on this point were extremely vague, however, and during the summer of 1933 the regime began seizing the property of Catholic lay organizations and forcing them to close down if they did not do so voluntarily. On 20 July newspapers were forbidden to call themselves ‘Catholic’ (all newspapers were to be ‘German’), and on 19 September 1933, the Bavarian political police, under Heinrich Himmler, banned ‘all activities on the part of Catholic organizations’ apart from youth groups, church choirs meeting for rehearsal, and charitable organizations considering applications for support. Alarmed, Cardinal Bertram, in Breslau, told Pope Pius XI on 4 October of the problems he foresaw with the Nazi ambition to exert total control over society, the banning of Catholic periodicals, the state’s interference in Church charities, and the banning or ‘co-ordination’ of Catholic voluntary associations. Another leading figure in the Church, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, objected publicly to attacks on non-Aryan Catholics, although he made no criticism of the regime’s moves against non-Catholic Jews. In the Vatican, Cardinal Pacelli, former Papal Nuncio to Germany and now Secretary of State under Pope Pius XI, complained to the German Foreign Ministry and threatened to issue a public letter of protest. But in practice nothing was done. The Catholic hierarchy in Germany considered it more effective to issue general declarations of support for the regime in the hope that they would stem the tide of anti-Catholic actions. Thus Archbishop Gröber in Freiburg declared publicly on 10 October 1933 ‘that I am placing myself completely behind the new government and the new Reich’, and then used his open loyalty to the regime to try to persuade the Nazi authorities in Baden to stop attacks on the Church. Yet the hierarchy could not protest too forcefully against measures it disliked because that was to enter the realm of politics, from which it had explicitly excluded itself by agreeing to the Concordat.49

  Map 6. Religious Affiliation in 1936

  In practice, the leading Nazis were aware of the dangers inherent in attacking deep-rooted institutions and traditions in the Catholic community. So they proceeded slowly. Even Himmler insisted in an order issued on 2 November 1933 that no anti-Catholic measures were to be taken without his instructions. The Gestapo began surveillance of Catholic activities, including church services, and paid particular attention to laymen formerly prominent in the Centre Party and the Bavarian People’s Party, drawing up lengthy lists of Catholics thought still to be opposed to the regime.50 Leading Nazis were particularly concerned at the continued refusal of Catholic youth organizations to dissolve themselves, which meant that the Hitler Youth was unable to make much progress in strongly Catholic areas. Control over the younger generation was vital for the building of the future. On 15 March 1934 the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach condemned the divisive influence of Catholic youth groups and urged parents to enrol their children in his own movement. He also started to encourage Hitler Youth units to pick fights with members of rival Catholic youth groups, thus beginning to apply the kind of coercion on the streets that had p
roved so effective on a wider scale in the first half of 1933.51 The hierarchy was given a sharp reminder when the SS shot dead Erich Klausener, General Secretary of Catholic Action, an important lay body, in his office in Berlin during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934, along with Adalbert Probst, National Director of the Catholic Youth Sports Association. In Munich those shot included Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Catholic weekly The Strait Way (Der gerade Weg) and a well-known critic of the regime. It was also strongly rumoured that the former Centre Party leader and ex-Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had been on the death-list, but he happened fortuitously to be on a visit to London and so escaped. The import of these events, which took place in the middle of personal negotiations between Hitler and the Catholic hierarchy on the future of Catholic lay organizations, could hardly have been clearer. Yet the same hierarchy made no protest about the murders. Instead, it joined with the Evangelical Church in a shared sense of relief at the defeat of supposedly immoral brownshirt radicals such as Röhm and appeared outwardly satisfied with the explanation that the murdered men had committed suicide or been shot while trying to escape.52

  II

  These events were swiftly followed by the death of Hindenburg, who was strongly identified as a representative of a conservative, Protestant, Christian faith, and the ending of the Nazi project of creating a national Church united around the German Christian idea. All this opened the way to a sharp escalation of anti-Catholic policies. It was at this time that a fierce debate began over the anti-Christian writings of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who publicly rejected such central doctrines as the immortality of the soul and Christ’s redemption of humankind from original sin. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg excoriated Catholicism as the creation of Jewish clericalism, and he elaborated these ideas further in a series of books published in the mid-1930s.53 Even the German Christians were appalled. They asked Hitler to repudiate these ideas, though without success. Rosenberg’s publications were immediately placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, and elicited a furious response from the German Catholic clergy. A variety of pamphlets, books, meetings and sermons condemned Rosenberg’s teachings, and anathematized his supporters within the Nazi Party. Rosenberg’s works were officially treated by the regime as nothing more than expressions of his own private views, however. It felt no need to disown them. But the regime recognized at the same time that the controversy was building up the resistance of the Catholic community to further penetration by Nazi ideology and institutions. As a Gestapo report noted in May 1935: ‘Numerous clerics are now taking a very critical position from the pulpit towards Rosenberg’s Myth and his new work To the Obscurantists of Our Day. They curse the spirit of the new age, the Godless and the heathen, by which they mean National Socialism.’54